Tips for teaching procedural skills
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Tips for teaching procedural skills Annette Burgess1,2*, Christie van Diggele2,3, Chris Roberts1,2 and Craig Mellis4
Abstract The teaching of procedural skills required for clinical practice remains an ongoing challenge in healthcare education. Health professionals must be competent to perform a wide range of clinical skills, and are also regularly required to teach these clinical skills to their peers, junior staff, and students. Teaching of procedural skills through the use of frameworks, observation and provision of feedback, with opportunities for repeated practice assists in the learners’ acquisition and retention of skills. With a focus on the teaching of non-complex skills, this paper explores how skills are learned; ways to improve skill performance; determining competency; and the provision of effective feedback. Keywords: Procedural skills teaching, Peyton’s four-step approach, Determining competency, Provision of feedback, Deliberate practice
Background Health professionals must have the ability to perform a wide range of clinical skills competently. These generally include history taking, physical examination, and procedural skills. While some procedural skills are specific to particular disciplines, competency in the performance of skills is required to ensure the delivery of safe patient care. Examples include correct hand washing technique, gastric tube insertion, cannulation, resuscitation, correct use of crutches, bedside dysphagia assessment, bed-to-chair transfer, and gait analysis. A skill that is learned and retained beyond the period of practice, can be recalled and competently performed in a variety of clinical settings [1]. Health professionals are regularly required to teach these clinical skills to their peers, junior staff, and students. However, the effectiveness of skills teaching is uncertain, and there is evidence suggesting junior health professionals are overconfident in their ability to teach practical skills [2]. With a focus on non-complex * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 The University of Sydney, Faculty of Medicine and Health, Sydney Medical School - Education Office, The University of Sydney, Edward Ford Building A27, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia 2 The University of Sydney, Faculty of Medicine and Health, Sydney Health Professional Education Research Network, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
procedural skills, this paper aims to explore how skills are learned; ways to improve skills performance; determining competency; and the provision of effective feedback.
How are skills learned?
In the last half of the twentieth century, many motor learning theorists posited the required steps to teach a psychomotor skill [3–6]. Building on this work, researchers have since proposed motor learning models for teaching and learning procedural skills [7, 8]. Common to most skills teaching literature is that skills are best learned by following a sequenced and stepped app
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